At least 90% of the homes in the United States use fiberglass insulation to help keep hot air from entering the house in the summer or leaving the house in the winter. A man made material, fiberglass insulation helps keep energy costs down and limits environmental degradation from power generation. However, fiberglass insulation can also be dangerous. Even a brief brush of skin on fiberglass can cause immediate skin inflammation. Floating particles of insulation can inflame the eyes and make breathing difficult. Finally, prolonged inhalation of fiberglass particles can also cause cancer.
Fiberglass is generally easy to install, but unfortunately at some point during every insulation installation fiberglass will need to be cut on sight. The properties of fiberglass, such as its low density, that make it such a great insulator make cutting extremely difficult. Before a cutting utensil can be effectively drawn through the material, it must be compressed. The material can be compressed with a knee and then cut, but this exposes the installer's knee, arm, and hand to the cancer causing fiberglass. As well, to insure a straight cut a rule or other straight edge is usually used as a guide. This not only provides no protection for the installer from the knife it also allows fiberglass particles released when the fiberglass is cut into the air. The ability of the installer to keep the ruler or other straight edge positioned properly also determines the suitability of the cut. This can lead to different qualities of cut between different installers as well as different qualities even with the same installer at different times.
Several instrumentalities of different types have been developed to deal with the above problems but they all suffer from one or more deficiencies. U.S. Pat. No. 4,354,410 and the SkarBoard are mechanically complicated and certainly unsuitable for home if not professional users. U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,086,680, 8,656,819, and 7,404,351 provide no or only a minimal method of compressing the fiberglass, no or only moderate protection from skin irritation, and no or only the most minimal cutting guides. Finally U.S. Pat. No. 9,272,432 does not allow the user to easily and safely provide additional compressible force, and provides significantly less protection from skin irritation and particle inhalation than the current disclosure. U.S. Pat. No. 9,272,432 also teaching raising the insulation off the floor for cutting. Though this may keep the knife from scraping across a metal portion of the device, cutting location must be determined before the insulation is compressed by the device. As the insulation would drape downward over the edges of the device, inserting insulation into the device makes accurate measurement of length or width impossible.
All of the current solutions suffer from one or more of the problems described above.